Cyberstrike James Barrington (book recommendations for teens TXT) 📖

‘Okay,’ he finally replied. ‘I’m recording this for my benefit so there’s no comeback later. This is confidential and privileged information and must not leave this room. Agreed? Both of you?’

Rogers and Clark both nodded.

‘No, verbally for the recorder, please. State your names and your positions within the agency and that you agree to what I’ve just said.’

The two FBI agents did that, both leaning slightly forward and obviously intrigued.

‘Right. My background is in computing and IT, and for a few years I was employed by the British police, including a stint with the Metropolitan force in London, to work on the PNC, the Police National Computer, and other computer systems. You may remember hearing about ten years ago that a paedophile had begun operating in the East Midlands area of Britain.’

As he said the word ‘paedophile’ Morgan could see both the Americans immediately tense in their seats, wondering where this was going.

‘That was nothing to do with me, obviously,’ he said, ‘but because paedophiles tend to inhabit the darker reaches of the Dark Web, the kind of places where British Bobbies not only fear to tread but have absolutely no idea how to access, I ended up tracking one particular guy’s footsteps as he swapped images and photographs with other people who shared his tastes. The police knew who he was, but there was no evidence he was doing anything other than looking at pictures and videos as part of this paedophile ring. I was tasked with monitoring his activities and trying to identify as many of his contacts as I could so that when the police did finally roll up that network they could take down as many people as possible. My tasking was just to watch him.’

‘I’m guessing something changed,’ Roger suggested.

‘It did,’ Morgan nodded. ‘That July a seven-year-old girl named Lizzie French disappeared from the back garden of her family home just outside Lincoln. Her body was found about ten days later. She’d been raped multiple times, then strangled and dumped in a ditch on a quiet side road outside a village around fifteen miles away. That case was followed by the disappearances of three other girls of similar ages over the next six months, all in broadly speaking the same area, within about fifty miles of Lincoln, and all the bodies were later dumped on quiet country roads. Obviously finding this killer became the highest priority of the Lincolnshire police force, but they had very little to go on. No suspects, no DNA – the killer always used a condom and the bodies of the victims were found naked and they all appeared to have been thoroughly washed before they were dumped – no witnesses and no detectable trace evidence.

‘Long story short. I wasn’t a police officer, so I wasn’t involved in the investigation, but obviously I knew what was going on and photographs of the girls were everywhere, on television and in the newspapers, as the police tried to identify anybody who had seen them being abducted or afterwards. And one afternoon I suddenly realised I was looking at a close-up of Lizzie French’s face in a Dark Web video.

‘Then the camera panned back and I could see that she was naked and spreadeagled on a single bed covered in a plastic sheet with her wrists and ankles roped to the four corners of the metal bed frame, and with a gag stuffed in her mouth. You don’t need me to tell you what the rest of that particular video consisted of, but the perpetrator filmed the entire proceedings, first holding the camera in his hand and then putting it on a tripod and pointing it down at the bed to record the main events.

‘Police forensic technicians pulled the film apart frame by frame and they found enough clues to suggest that the rapist – who was no doubt also responsible for murdering the girl – was the paedophile I’d been tracking through the Dark Web. There was a very brief shot of part of his face as he turned the camera and that was sufficient to potentially identify him. He was arrested and charged and his house was searched. The room where the rape had occurred was identified, but they couldn’t find a single trace of usable forensic evidence that would link him to any of the four dead girls. Everything rested upon the video that the perpetrator had shot himself and on half a dozen other videos we recovered showing him in the same room abusing the other three victims.’

Morgan swallowed the last of his coffee and nodded as Rogers topped up his mug again. The memory still shook him after all this time.

‘In the United Kingdom we appear to have a whole flock of senior judges who are very well versed in the law but who don’t seem to have any particular regard for justice. When the case came to court, before the proceedings got started there was a long legal discussion between the judge and the prosecuting and defence counsels. It was held in camera, which means everybody else was excluded from the courtroom while it was going on. In fact I think it might even have been held in the judge’s chambers. And the conclusion, bizarrely enough, was that the video evidence was inadmissible because all the sequences had been filmed for the man’s own private and personal use and the police had had no right to take copies of them without his permission. Which obviously he hadn’t given. There was a lot of legalese surrounding the decision but that, as far as I remember it, was the thrust of the argument.’

‘So what happened?’ Bill Clark asked.

‘Exactly what you would expect to happen. The case was dismissed for lack of evidence and this proven paedophile and multiple murderer walked out of the High Court a few minutes later without a stain on his character. There was no doubt about his guilt. He’d actually